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Ub, ub and away

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New Zealand electric utility bike maker Ubco has just had a boost, announcing a deal with Australia Post. 

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According to The Herald, the Tauranga based company has sold 175 faster rear-wheeled 'Duty' models for "a pilot programme that could lead to a wider rollout for [Australia Post's] 10,000 posties".

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Some of NZ Post's posties are also zipping around on Ubco bikes as part of a much smaller trial, and they can also be found underneath French police officers and various conservation authorities like DOC and US National Parks Service.

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So far the company has sold 6,000 bikes and, just as electric boat company Vessev has changed its focus to ferries and tourist boats, Ubco looks to have seen more potential with fleets than with the rural or outdoor sector.

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On the slightly sexier side of the two-wheeled electric world, Wellington company FTN Motion is also getting set to launch two of its beauties in Australia, the Streetdog Classic and the speedier Streetdog 80.

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For those who really want to push the bike out, it has recently done a collab with Tyler Richardson of Helmart and it's a unique sight to behold.

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Rewiring Aotearoa’s chief scientist Saul Griffith is also working on a pretty special two-wheeler and we’ll be sure to let you know when it’s available. 

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Hail to the chief

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Cheap energy has been at the heart of human progress and fossil fuels have taken us a long way. But there’s a new champ in town: renewable energy is the cheapest energy we’ve ever had and it’s getting cheaper all the time.  

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As Octopus Energy’s founder Greg Jackson says: “I don't demonise the fossil fuel industry - they got us where we are and power much of the world today. But we need to move past them. It's simply better to do so.

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In the long run, clean energy will win - along with electric cars, heat pumps, electrification of industry. The sooner it happens, the better for society and for the economy, never mind the planet.” 

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It’s also the greatest business opportunity of this generation, he says. And, as our Investing in Tomorrow paper suggested, it’s also a great opportunity for Government investment to help get the technology into the right people’s hands and speed up the inevitable. 

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David Wallace-Wells, whose article and book The Uninhabitable Earth looked at the "cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet", seems to have become more optimistic of late and a lot of that optimism stems from solar. 

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His opinion piece in The New York Times ‘What will we do with all our free power?’ explains the amazing solar evolution - and its potential.

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‘By just 2030, Chase estimates, solar power will be absolutely and reliably free during the sunny parts of the day for much of the year “pretty much everywhere.” …

“When it was a 10th of its current size 10 years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown,” The Economist noted in a recent cover story. “The next tenfold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.” By the 2030s — not very long from now — solar power will most likely be the largest source of electricity on the planet.”

Even more remarkable than the scale is the cost. By one measure, the cost of solar power is less than one-thousandth of what it was when hippies and environmentalists first made a point of installing panels on their roofs in the 1960s. A decade ago, it was considered a moonshot goal to reduce the price of a solar module to a dollar per watt; now they are being manufactured for one-tenth as much. The price fell by nearly half in 2023 alone.

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Climate change, as Griffith said in his presentation this week, is primarily an energy problem.

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So how do you fix that? 

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And while solar isn't the only solution, it's turning out to be a massive help.

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Cut your way to growth

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The Germans are renowned for their ruthless efficiency, but that wasn't always the case when it came to building renewables. Now, however, the country is on a tear and has offered a proof point to show that if you simplify permitting, you get a lot more energy supply - and quickly. 

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In Bloomberg, Marilen Martin and Akshat Rathi write about Germany’s forced shift away from Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine and the rise of solar, wind and LNG infrastructure.

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“Solar and wind projects across Europe had at the time been stymied by bureaucracy. The time it took to get permits had doubled since 2017. In Germany, securing approvals for one 2022 project to erect three wind turbines required 36,000 pages of documentation printed out and handed to the authorities. Since then, German red tape has been drastically reduced, according to interviews with renewable-energy executives. In just over two years, the country is now deploying more renewables than any other European peer.”

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We’re in favour of red tape removal at Rewiring Aotearoa. The focus often seems to be on getting big things built faster and we agree that's essential when it comes to renewables, but we’re always fighting for the customer and we also need to cut some red tape when it comes to rooftop solar. 

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New Zealand installations are significantly more expensive than Australian installs and that’s in part due to additional compliance costs. As Griffith mentioned on his interview with Kathryn Ryan on RNZ, Australia allows solar installs to be signed off via a mobile app almost instantly, whereas California has a 90 day process that means a number of sales don't go through. So let’s get cutting!

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